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Comment by creepydata | Hacker News Reader

>Zuckerberg explained: “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve [Facebook’s] community.”

Interesting enough Obama said the exact same thing about his suit choices.

“You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” [Obama] said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”(1)

So decision fatigue doesn't need to go hand in hand with super casual.

(1) http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2012/10/michael-lewis-profile...

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"Zuckerberg explained: “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve [Facebook’s] community."

Most likely he just doesn't enjoy fashion. Some people love fashion, shopping clothes, figuring out what do dress, and derive tremendous joy from them.

Zuckerberg and Obama aren't one of them. At least Obama is being more honest about the reasoning, while Zuckerberg is just spinning it.

Pragmatism is a good principle but as you say there are persons who enjoy clothing itself as a form of art and self-expression. Casual/minimalism (as jeans+tshirt only) in clothing is not the rational choice for everyone.

As an example: Someone who doesn't particularly enjoy music could advocate that as a means to make fewer decisions and not waste time in non-adaptive behavior he doesn't listen to music. If the ingroup has similar tastes then it's converted into a "truth" and non-conformity prejudiced.

Overall I think that the intelligent thing is to dress according to what is expected/acceptable. A lot of people seems to think that the move to casual dress is some kind of new achieved freedom and that we're growing out of being biased against other's persons clothing. The reality, as posts here can attest, is that it was simply a change in dressing code. There is still a bias, now it's just placed in the more "formal" clothing.

I personally prefer tailored/formal clothing. But as casual dressers were discriminated in the 60s-70s so I would be in the current workplace if I dressed as I desired. The solution is simple: Dress as expected in work and as you like in your personal life. We as a species have not grown out of groupthink yet.

>I personally prefer tailored/formal clothing. But as casual dressers were discriminated in the 60s-70s so I would be in the current workplace if I dressed as I desired.

Would you though? Because tailored suits are a casual hipster staple nowadays too. You can meet a guy with huge victorian mustache and beard and a fine suit and they're a graphic designer or something....

I agree it's not quite the same thing. At one point not wearing the required jacket and tie was just grounds for dusmissal. Now "overdressing" in some manner is just eccentric. Of course, not everyone has the luxury of being eccentric.

I guess in those cases the tuxedo t-shirt is the best compromise...

I, too, dress more formally than my peers. I'm in that weird Generation Y (mid 30s-early 40s) that started working in the late 90s/early 00s where business casual was expected but before casual became the norm.

Americans are generally not as concerned with fashion, period. It might be extreme to wear a black turtleneck everyday, but Steve Jobs didn't invent this, and I'm not sure he could get away with it in say, Paris.

>and I'm not sure he could get away with it in say, Paris.

He could. Low-brow fashion may be about keeping up with the latest trends, but fashion sense in the way they'd appreciate in say France or Italy is mainly about the personality shown in your attire -- and such a personal uniform would be totally acceptable (at worst viewed as eccentric in the good sense).

It's so interesting that you'd say that.

I work with lots of Italian and French people, and am a bit obsessed with the French culture and language. I observe that the opposite holds -- fashion-conscious Europeans sometimes let their personality be defined by their fashion choices. The personality, whatever that means, is secondary. Not to say that they are superficial at all, but rather that looks and presentation are so important to them (not a bad thing!) that it becomes a bigger part of who you are.

For example just today -- an Italian colleague struck up a conversation with me while we were grabbing coffee in the kitchen. He was wearing a blazer, nice dress pants and nice shoes. I was wearing jeans, hoodie, t-shirt. He asked me what cologne I like, and literally fanned the scent from his neck onto me, so I could smell his good taste in fragrance. His cologne did smell really good, but I was still jarred by the whole experience.

>but rather that looks and presentation are so important to them (not a bad thing!)

How is this not bad? I don't think the saying is "judge a book by its cover".

Wasting so much energy on superficial things has to take it from somewhere else.

>How is this not bad?

In that it shows some effort and respect for the other's eyes, plus some sense of aesthetics (the looks as in "presentation", not as in being naturally good looking).

>I don't think the saying is "judge a book by its cover"

Well, that's deprecated advice. It hold true when it was created in 19th early 20th century, when books all had the same leather bound cover or bland design.

The last 30+ years books have tons of information on their cover, including awards the book has won, short reviews, recommendations, a summary, and even a small bio of the author in some cases. You are supposed to judge them by their cover -- that's how you pick them in the bookstore.

I think today we're supposed to judge them based on their Amazon reviews.

Which is closer to his point than yours :o)

Ironically the authors I've spoken to are often upset that the cover is chosen entirely for marketing purposes and often has little to do with the contents of the book. Things like choosing a cover model of different race and sometimes even gender from the protagonist(s) of the book.

I've never picked a modern book by its cover because it's a facade that the author/publisher decorates to manipulate you into thinking something. The same applies to putting so much emphasis on looks, it just opens you up to being lied to.

As the sibling comment identifies, you read reviews of trusted people or the masses.

>I work with lots of Italian and French people, and am a bit obsessed with the French culture and language. I observe that the opposite holds -- fashion-conscious Europeans sometimes let their personality be defined by their fashion choices. The personality, whatever that means, is secondary.

That might be, but I wasn't saying that they put personality first above appearance.

What I said is that appearance matters to them, but not in the "is he/she wearing the latest fashion items" sense, but that they (also) appreciate a deeper "does the attire reflect an aesthetic choice/strong personality" (as opposed to someone merely wearing whatever he threw on himself or whatever everybody wears).

In other words, that they might be for fashion, but they would respect opinionated attire -- such like Jobs.

If you want to see something interesting, start a discussion about food.

If Italian and French people are not superficial, it looks an awful lot like it!

A remarkable number of fashion designers have adopted their own Jobsian uniform. Carolina Herrera almost always wears a white dress shirt with a pencil skirt, Karl Lagerfeld has his peculiar gothic suits and high-collared shirts, Marc Jacobs is rarely seen without a kilt. It's something of a trope within the fashion world - the designers who work to push forward the boundaries of fashion often stick with the same basic style for decades.

Hard to lead if you're busy following everyone elses whims all the time (fashion).

It's also harder to be criticized for your fashion choices if you wear the same thing all the time, which is nice if you're likely to be highly scrutinized for your fashion choices. No one's going to call out Anna Wintour for having a stupid haircut.

I don't know why we have to presume or assume anything about anyone.

Zuckerberg is just as valid as Obama in why THEY choose to dress the way they do.

I'm a honey badger when it comes to clothes. I just wear free crap i get from conferences and buy jeans/shorts as needed. I don't spend any brain power on doing anything other than making sure i'm comfortable and fit the season(s). I spend money on quality - i don't want my clothing failing when mountaineering but "Fashion" is the last thing on my mind and i tend to get 10-15 years out of my REI / North face outdoor clothing

A focus on fashion or appearance in the scope of work is a distraction. Where whatever you want to wear but don't assume others have any interest or admiration of such.

If I were Zuckerberg, I would just hire somebody to manage my wardrobe. Give them access to my calendar and have my clothes ready when I get up.

Austrian / Europe here. We are slightly more formal in business life when it comes to how we dress but certainly more relaxed that our Italian neighbors.

I remember well when I did my military service and ha to wear a uniform. At first I hated it but when I "disarmed" and went back to my civil life, the daily "burden" to decide what to wear was a distraction. Sure I quickly re-adapted but anyhow

Yea Italians are a pain in the ass about dressing; people here are stuck in the 80s still when it comes to work so it only makes sense it works that way.

Italian here. I don't know what your experience is, but I have to call bullshit.

Such generic comments applying to an entire population should be best avoided.

I have worked in Italian, British, American and Spanish engineering companies and I have not noticed any significant differences in dressing code, with the UK probably being the more formal environment (we had "Casual Fridays", which meant that the rest of the week we had to wear shirts). In the rest I could get by with a polo shirt and jeans.

Of course people with more contact with the outside tend to dress more formally, but this has been true for every company I have been.

My experience is being born and raised in Rome, working with people from different cities (Pi Campus here in Rome, H-Farm in Veneto, etc) and now working in Santa Monica. Not much to call bullshit on, if you don't see any difference between Cali and Italy I don't know what to tell you.

I also noticed that after military service. In the service, I had two uniforms that were exactly the same that I wore every day. At first I hated the uniform, but after I finished, I realized how convenient it is to not ever have to think about your outfit at all. I sort of practice this now as well, with a well defined 'base' of jeans and a shirt that doesn't need ironing.

This kind of thinking became fashionable a few years ago when the studies supporting "decision fatigue" were getting press. I wonder if they'll survive the replication crisis. It seems like the kind of thing that wouldn't.

The "replication crisis" doesn't matter.

Lots of people know from experience that they're staring in their wardrobe every day for tens of minutes to decide what to wear and hate it.

That doesn't change for them if some experts can't replicate the original findings of some "decision fatigue" paper. The burden of choosing every day is enough, even without fatigue.

I think it does. I'm guessing most of the people who take the single outfit approach do so based on what they've heard about decision fatigue. Not because they want to save the 30 seconds they spend picking out a shirt every morning, but because that decision supposedly impacts their decision making for the rest of the day.

>but because that decision supposedly impacts their decision making for the rest of the day.

I don't think that would be relevant. They still have to make 2000 other decisions and micro-decisions throughout the day anyway...

> Lots of people know from experience that they're staring in their wardrobe every day for tens of minutes to decide what to wear and hate it.

Simple solution: Wear what is at the top of the clothes stack in your wardrobe and add clothes that come from laundry to the bottom of the stacks in your wardrobe (for computer scientists: Make the clothing stacks in your wardrobe a FIFO queue).

That assumes that you've optimized your clothes so that everything goes with everything else or that you don't care if things match or not. And if you're either one of those types of people you're probably not agonizing over what to wear in the morning in the first place

Yeah that's me.

I own 3 pairs of dark blue jeans (of the same style), half a dozen tshirts (dark blue, dark grey), 4 shirts (all vertically striped).

I just wear whatever is clean, I don't think I've spent more than an hour on clothing choices in the last year (and most of that hour would have been picking a suit out).

I do make sure everything is clean and ironed though, I like to look neat if not smart.

Oh I agree, and to anyone who doesn't buy several dozen pairs of identical socks once a decade, all I can say is you don't know what you're missing.

But it was fashionable to cite these studies for a while and to consciously adopt strategies based on them. That's a bit different—more like reorganizing your diet based on studies that perhaps eventually get overturned.

But when Putin or others decide to do the same - wearing mostly the same-looking suits all the time - it's said that this is to make timestamping photos of the official more difficult.

Make up your mind, Internet.

Variant of this is that some celebrities are said to dress identically from day to day to reduce the value of paparazzi photos of them.

I've only ever heard this about Radcliffe doing this once, do you know of more examples?

> Zuckerberg explained: “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve [Facebook’s] community.”

What an awkward way to force "Look what a good CEO I am" into the conversation.

I was in the Navy for 20 years, and never once had to think about what to wear. Glorious. Just had to make sure to wear the clean uniform...

well, http://www.trbimg.com/img-53ffb406/turbine/la-ig-obama-tan-s...

dude loves mom jeans as well.

>so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve [Facebook’s] community

As if the best interests of the FB community are even in consideration...

That is just standard boilerplate BS, but certainly more polite than "fuck you".

I think that reasoning is kind of lame (is it really so hard? do they eat the same thing every meal?) But certainly both Obama and Zuckerberg would be distinctive figures regardless of what they wore.

> do they eat the same thing every meal?

I can't speak for Obama or Zuck, but I've been eating the same type of breakfast (cereal+milk) consistently [1]for the last 15 or so years (at age 27). Not mainly because of decision fatigue, but because I'm the polar opposite of a morning person, and the morning routine helps my drowzy morning self to leave home on time.

[1] Except when I'm traveling, because I'm certainly not taking a box of cereal with me. :)

Sounds like you are draining your precious life forces with the incredibly burdensome decision of what to eat the other two meals every day! How inefficient.

My buy-in into the decision fatique camp is gradually increasing, though.

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